Coping Strategies In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried
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Coping Strategies-The Things They Carried When in war, humans don't generally know how to react to a horrific experience. So these people must figure out a way themselves to cope with the feeling of these events by themselves. This causes turmoil amongst people in post-war. In the metafiction The Things They Carried, the reader witnesses the soldiers stories in the Alpha Company in Vietnam. The reader will see the different ways these soldiers coped with PTSD and compare which strategies helped post war and those that didn’t and their outcomes. In addition to “The Things They Carried” two other articles; “How did soldiers cope with war?”(British Library) and “Coping with War”(PBS Newshour) offer other ways how soldiers deal with war experiences and their coping strategies.…show more content… “Many of course did not”-(Shaw Pg.1) From the chapter “Speaking of Courage” we have the character Norman Bowker had a difficult time readjusting to civilian life in Iowa after Vietnam. Norman was one out of “millions who had to cope with physical trauma or the loss of others.,,,and found it difficult to talk about their experiences, or found it hard to relate”-(Shaw Pg.4). Norman had a hard time finding a way for himself to cope with his experiences especially after the loss of Kiowa which he feels responsible for is death. Norman found his coping strategy in suicide. Another way Norman found a coping strategy was in the chapter “Notes” when writing to Tim about the war and found writing to someone who understands is therapeutic for him. This helped Tim continue writing down his war experiences as a way of